Stamford schools face a changing tide in demographics

Maggie Gordon

Published 7:59 pm, Saturday, February 16, 2013

`30 YEARS AHEAD

Enrollment data shows that 32.2 percent of the district's elementary school students are white, down from 34 percent last year. For the second year in a row, more elementary school students identify as Hispanic than any other race.

Alswanger said he always thought the city's schools were incredibly diverse when he was a student, but that's nothing compared to their current makeup.

In the mid-'60s, roughly one in seven Stamford Public School students was a minority. By the late-'80s, the ratio was nearing one in two, and the scale tipped in the early '90s. In 1991, 49 percent of the district's students were not white, and by 1992, minorities were the majority, making up 52.1 percent of the district's student body.

But while much of the increase of Stamford's diversity in the '70s, '80s and '90s was due to a growing black population, the new Stamford is predominately Latino -- a phenomenon that mirrors the national trend.

"It's true that the Hispanic population is growing more rapidly than the African-American population, and in fact they surpassed blacks as the nation's largest minority group about a decade ago," said D'Vera Cohn of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan "fact tank" based in Washington, D.C. "So you'd expect that this change at the national level would be working its way through local communities as well."

The Census Bureau recently projected that by 2043 the nation will be one of majority minority -- meaning fewer than half of the residents will be non-Hispanic whites. The Census Bureau is not the only organization making such projections.

A Pew Research paper, co-authored by Cohn, estimated that in 2050 "the Hispanic population could be as high as 29 (percent), up from 17 (percent) now," while the black population increases from 12 percent to 13 percent and the Asian-American population increases from 5 percent to 9 percent. At the same time, the white population's share would decrease from 63 percent in 2011 to 47 percent, according to Cohn's research.

Stamford is ahead of that curve. According to data from the Census Bureau, 25.4 percent of the city's residents identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino in 2011.

"In 30 years, this is what America's going to look like, and I think it gives a great advantage for our students to be in this environment," Alswanger said.

"I think they learn to appreciate different cultures and backgrounds and work with people across all different spectrums, and when their future workplaces look how Stamford's schools look now, these kids, they're the future leaders in America," he said. "We're 30 years ahead."

One would expect that as Stamford's Hispanic population increases exponentially, the black and white populations would decrease in their percentages of the entire population. But it's not just their share of the demographics that is decreasing; it's the actual number of people.

For example, when Alswanger graduated from Stamford's public schools in 1984, there were 2,015 black students in the city's elementary schools; by 2012 that number had decreased by roughly 30 percent to 1,401 black children.

Changing Tides

Similarly the white population decreased by 25 percent, from 3,350 students in Stamford's elementary schools in 1984 to 2,500 this year. During that same time period, the Hispanic population has quadrupled, from 765 students in 1984 to 2,997 in 2012, while the Asian-American population multiplied by almost six times, from 147 elementary students then to 860 now.

But the changing tide was not solely built on incremental changes over several decades; it is also due to rapid change in recent years.

The total student population at the elementary school level has increased by 7.6 percent since October 2009. During that time, the Asian-American population has grown at the exact same pace, increasing by 7.6 percent during the three-year period, while the black population has essentially held steady with an increase of 13 students.

At the same time, the number of white students fell 8.4 percent from 2,728 children to an even 2,500, a loss that has been more than offset by a 21.9 percent increase in the Hispanic population, from 2,458 students in 2009 to 2,997 in 2012.

The diversity can be seen throughout the district, but perhaps the best example is at Springdale Elementary School on Hope Street. In 2009, there were exactly 224 white students and 224 Hispanic students at the elementary school, with each subgroup accounting for 40.4 percent of the total student population. This year, there are 79 more Hispanic students than white students, and the shares are 45.8 percent Hispanic and 33.8 percent white.

Nationally, the decline in young black and white Americans is linked with age structure and birth rates among those populations, according to Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, and author of the book "Resegregation of American Schools: A Hidden Crisis in American Education," which was released in October.

"The major population groups aren't reproducing themselves, except for Latinos. ... The Latino population is the youngest and most fertile and has the largest families of many major groups," Orfield said.

"We've been in a really long dry spell in white births in this country, and there's a decline of black births as well," he said.

According to the Center for American Progress, 50.4 percent of children the age of 1 in 2011 were children of color, marking the first time in history that the majority of American newborns were actually "minorities."

But Jack Bryant, president of Stamford's NAACP, thinks there's more to it than low birth rates; working-class black families are being pushed out of Stamford at a fast pace, he said.

"Housing has been taken down, and housing in the South End is at a premium right now," Bryant said. "Those families have to go somewhere and they're not staying in Stamford -- and that's why you're seeing the decrease in the amount of African-Americans in Stamford Public Schools."

Bryant said his comments specifically apply to the black population that traditionally lived in the city's West Side and Waterside communities, which is the hub of NAACP activity.

In the decade between the years 2000 and 2010, census data shows that the black population in those neighborhoods has decreased by 22 percent, from 8,972 people to 7,012 people.

"They can't afford to live here. That dream is not possible for them," Bryant said. That's not a hard-and-fast assessment though, he said, noting that black families who can afford to stay in the city often do.

The number of black families in the wealthiest corners of the city has remained a bit more constant. Take the black population in North Stamford, for instance; it has increased from 440 people in 2000 to 482 people in 2010, while the black population in Shippan has decreased from 42 to 34 people. But in Waterside and the West Side, areas that half the city's black population called home in 2000, Bryant says black men and women are "being forced out" due to rapid development, which has displaced many families from longtime homes.

Census data shows that in 2000, there were 8,972 black people counted in the Waterside and West Side areas. In 2010, that shrunk to 7,042, a decrease of 1,930 people -- or 22 percent.

Challenge, Opportunity

Educating a rapidly changing city comes with some difficulties, as educators grapple with how to teach children and engage parents who speak more than 100 different languages. But it's a challenge facing the entire nation, and one Superintendent of Schools Winifred Hamilton said Stamford schools are up to facing and conquering.

"I think it can be a challenge and an opportunity," Hamilton said.

"The challenge is we're working with children that at times speak a different language at home, and are learning a new language that they'll be tested on," she said.

The opportunity, Hamilton said, is that the city's students will come out ahead of the curve when compared to other pupils across the country.

"One of the goals in our mission statement is preparing students for the 21st century, and this is the demographics -- the world in which we're preparing kids to live," she said "I think it's one of the richest things about Stamford: Stamford is the real world."